Top 10 Things The Twilight Films Did Terribly

Without question, there are plenty of things that were terrible about the Twilight films. But across the Internet, several lame websites that aren’t as good as Treegnome.weebly have already covered that and, besides, that’s not what this article is about. Read the title again, it’s right there. I, Treegnome, armed only with my expert sentence-writing skills and a heightened ability to watch movies, have compiled a list of theTwilight films' 10 most miserable failures. That does sound pretty much the same, I guess, but it's different, OK? At one point, I thought about adding “Translating the Book Into Film” somewhere on the list, but then I realized it included every single other thing I might have put on this list, and that really didn’t leave me anything else to write. So, you know, here’s some other stuff instead: Oh wait, retract the colon (this thing “:”, children)! First, let us pay our respects to those notable failures that didn’t make the cut: Consistent Vampire Paleness, Not Making a Fan Base So Annoying That it Actually Creates Separate Teams of People Who like Twilight to Compete With Other People Who Like Twilight Over Who Likes Twilight the Best, and The Films’ Interpretation of Laurent’s… “Olive” Skin. K, ready? It’s Colon Time:

​10. Glittery Edward Scene.

Probably the most original and downright impressive part of the Twilight series is that it has become the most popular vampire/werewolf series of our generation by massively altering- no, actually totally replacing the very definition of vampires and werewolves. You see, traditionally, vampires are almost mindless, zombie-like monsters (unless you’re Dracula) that must kill humans to survive, but can, at least be killed a few different ways: stakes to the heart, sunlight, maybe silver or blood-starvation. On the other hand, in Twilight land, getting bit by a vampire is the greatest possible thing that could ever happen to you. Not only do you get to keep everything about your personality and gain super-speed and super-strength, but if you were cool enough as a human, you get unique bonus superpowers! It’s like a free invitation to be one of the X-Men, and all you have to do is seduce a vampire into biting you without killing you. Also, the only two things in the whole universe that can kill you are easily-escapable. One is vampires: survive them by not pissing any off. The other is werewolves (and official Twilight records indicate they only live on the reservation just outside of Forks, Washington): survive them by… moving out of Washington. And, you don’t have to kill anyone if you don’t want to. But if you do want to, you can kill as many people as you’d like, and the only people who could even do anything about it either don’t care or live presumably far away in Washington. Oh, and I’m pretty sure none of that had to do with my point except to say that in Twilight land, vampires don’t burn to death in sunlight, they um… sparkle… yeah…

Okay, I know this all sounds crazy, but it really does make sense when you read it in the book, I swear. Here, I’ll break it down for you: You see, the way it happens in the book is that Edward is infatuated with Bella, but also wants to murder her and drink her blood. So to protect her from himself, Edward tries to scare her away by being romantic and mysterious. Too bad for him, Bella likes romantic and mysterious guys. Plus, she has this annoying habit of noticing he’s superhuman every time he saves her from the dangerous situations that he witnesses while stalking her. More to the point, after one of these episodes, when she guesses the truth that he’s a bloodsucking monster, she accepts his invitation to go to the woods with him. There he reveals to her that when sunlight hits his skin, it shines like thousands of diamonds… huh. You know, it sounds stupid when I say it too, but it… it just… I don’t know, it was just better in the book, okay? Stephanie Meyer has some amazing, Hitler-like ability to explain completely insane things in such a way that it totally makes sense to millions of people. Regardless of how apparently ridiculous this all is when you think about it, the film did an excellent job of making it twice as ridiculous as anything you’ve ever seen before it. In Twilight, the movie, Edward seems a lot less romantic and a lot more like a violent, heroine addicted rapist, but there’s more on that further down the list. For now, the key point to focus on is the utter failure of the film adaptation. BONUS GAME: I’m going to describe the film version for you, and you see if you can spot what’s different from the book. It’s the middle of the school day, when suddenly, Edward forcefully pulls Bella into the forest by her arm to ask her if she thinks he’s a vampire or not. Then he throws her on his back and uses vampire super-speed to zoom her to a remote area where he unbuttons his shirt in the sunlight and it appears he is covered in glitter. And then, for the sake of the dumbfounded audience who is undoubtedly thinking, “What the eff am I supposed to be looking at here?” Bella says, “It’s like diamonds,” which, incidentally, no it's not.

Pictured: diamonds.

​ Let me tell you, if your special effect is so poorly done that you decide to use a character in the movie to explain to your audience what it’s supposed to look like, you’re not fooling anyone. And for that effing matter, let me also tell you: if an obvious psychopath from your social circle kidnaps you from school and drags you into the middle of the woods while displaying superhuman strength and speed and then opens up his shirt to reveal the shocking truth that he is, in fact, totally covered with glitter, there is no conceivable response you are less likely to say than, “Oh wow! It’s like diamonds!” NO! NO IT’S NOT! IT’S EFFING NOT LIKE DIAMONDS AT ALL! It looks like glitter, you stupid! And you should really be running for your life and screaming right now, because, vampire or not, this crazy mothereffer is going to cannibalize you out here! The worst part is, even though it looks nothing like diamonds and everything like glitter, it’s actually not glitter, which means that the Twilight film team paid someone, probably thousands of dollars, to use expensive digital artistry to make it appear as if someone who, in reality, is wearing no glitter at all, is, get this, REALLY WEARING LOTS OF GLITTER! Couldn’t they have just gone to the 98¢ store and bought some glitter, saving thousands of dollars to put toward their other terrible-looking special effects? It’s a sad day for filmmaking when you spend several thousands of dollars and likely several days worth of effort using digital effects to artificially recreate something that costs pennies in real life and only takes minutes to apply.

​9. Cartoon Werewolves.

To be fair, throughout history, there has never once been a visual representation of a werewolf that didn’t look laughably ridiculous or that even remotely resembled anything that would be anatomically possible. There’s something about the head-to-body ratio that no one can ever seem to get right. Of course, if humans were meant to have man-eating wolf-monsters for faces, then God probably wouldn’t have granted us the ability to reproduce. But I digress. The thing to point out in this article is that this time around, all the effects team needed to do was take ordinary wolves and make them look bigger. Now I’m not saying that’s easy, but I will say that humans have spent decades perfecting the digital animation of deadly animals that don’t look like cartoons so that if you want to, you can convincingly film a movie about deadly animals without actually getting mauled by them. However, instead of making the only appropriate use of mankind’s ability to make CGI look like real animals, the Twilight Saga Film Series Thing’s special effects team, Tippett Studios, used their ability to make CGI look like cartoons. According to wikipedia.com, “Tippett Studio first began working on the CGI (computer-generated imagery) wolves in February of 2009 for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and the look of the creatures has evolved, becoming more photo real (italics mine -Treegnome) over the course of the saga…” which is a really nice way of saying, “Tippett Studio first began working on the CGI wolves in February of 2009 for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and they looked like cartoons. Three years and three movies later, the look of the creatures has evolved and is starting to look less like cartoons… but still looks very much like cartoons.”